Great Words on Political Issues

An election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods.

-Ambrose Bierce


It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

- Ayn Rand


A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.

- George Bernard Shaw


When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.

-James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union


If CON is the the opposite of PRO, does that mean that CONgress is the opposite of PROgress?

-Gallagher


They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin, 1759


A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

-Barry Goldwater


...You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer...

- Abraham Lincoln



Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.

- US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991



They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.

-Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister in Nazi Germany, in 1945; from "Political Quotations", Daniel B. Baker, ed.


A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.

-Alexander Fraser Tyler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic